"Provides an extremely valuable introduction to the work of Michel Serres for an English-speaking audience, as well as offering useful critical approaches for those already familiar with its outlines."
---Robert Harrison, Stanford University [blurb from review pending permission]
The work of Michel Serres---including the books Hermes, The Parasite, The Natural Contract, Genesis, The Troubadour of Knowledge, and Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time---has stimulated readers for years, as it challenges the boundaries of science, literature, culture, language, and epistemology. The essays in Mapping Michel Serres, written by the leading interpreters of his work, offer perspectives from a range of disciplinary positions, including literature, language studies, and cultural theory. Contributors include Maria Assad, Hanjo Berressem, Stephen Clucas, Steven Connor, Andrew Gibson, René Girard, Paul Harris, Marcel Hénaff, William Johnsen, William Paulson, Marjorie Perloff, Philipp Schweighauser, Isabella Winkler, and Julian Yates.
"Provides an extremely valuable introduction to the work of Michel Serres for an English-speaking audience, as well as offering useful critical approaches for those already familiar with its outlines."
---Robert Harrison, Stanford University [blurb from review pending permission]
The work of Michel Serres---including the books Hermes, The Parasite, The Natural Contract, Genesis, The Troubadour of Knowledge, and Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time---has stimulated readers for years, as it challenges the boundaries of science, literature, culture, language, and epistemology. The essays in Mapping Michel Serres, written by the leading interpreters of his work, offer perspectives from a range of disciplinary positions, including literature, language studies, and cultural theory. Contributors include Maria Assad, Hanjo Berressem, Stephen Clucas, Steven Connor, Andrew Gibson, René Girard, Paul Harris, Marcel Hénaff, William Johnsen, William Paulson, Marjorie Perloff, Philipp Schweighauser, Isabella Winkler, and Julian Yates.
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"Provides an extremely valuable introduction to the work of Michel Serres for an English-speaking audience, as well as offering useful critical approaches for those already familiar with its outlines."
---Robert Harrison, Stanford University [blurb from review pending permission]
The work of Michel Serres---including the books Hermes, The Parasite, The Natural Contract, Genesis, The Troubadour of Knowledge, and Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time---has stimulated readers for years, as it challenges the boundaries of science, literature, culture, language, and epistemology. The essays in Mapping Michel Serres, written by the leading interpreters of his work, offer perspectives from a range of disciplinary positions, including literature, language studies, and cultural theory. Contributors include Maria Assad, Hanjo Berressem, Stephen Clucas, Steven Connor, Andrew Gibson, René Girard, Paul Harris, Marcel Hénaff, William Johnsen, William Paulson, Marjorie Perloff, Philipp Schweighauser, Isabella Winkler, and Julian Yates.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472024964 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 12/14/2009 |
| Series: | Studies In Literature And Science |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 418 KB |
About the Author
Niran Abbas is Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies, Kingston University.
Read an Excerpt
MAPPING Michel Serres
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2005
University of Michigan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-11438-2
Chapter One FROM RITUAL TO SCIENCE
RENÉ GIRARD
"Contrary to what is always said, science does not cancel out nonscience. ... Myth remains dense in knowledge, and vice versa" (Z, 32, 49). Thus, we must not believe in the dogma of the "two cultures," almost foreign to one another-the first vigorous, utilitarian, but "deprived of imagination," the second useless, imaginary, gratuitous, always free to go where it likes.
There is something disconcerting in this, first of all for the scientists who want science to be taken seriously. It is in an antiscientific spirit, until now, that attention has been called to the proximity of science and myth, in order to cancel out science in the preliminary nullity of mythology. Of course, there is no question of doing this. The growing efficiency of scientific models is not denied, but, between the most recent state of knowledge and all that precedes it, the famous "epistemological break" is always there. That is to say that it is never there, and that it is a part of myth in the most ordinary sense. Scientific ideology sees fecundity only in rupture with the past. It is from continuity, on the contrary, that science draws constantly renewed forces, but this continuity also renews the literatures and other cultural artifacts that are often at the same level of elaboration as science. There are also time lags, but not always in the interest of the scientists. We cannot count on the inevitable lateness of literature under the pretext that literature is necessarily impressionistic and regressive.
It is literary people's turn to be worried. More than anything else, they do not want literature to be taken seriously. For a century, they have wanted as prophets only people who say to them: art and literature, that's zero. Sudden menace to the derisory autonomy of the zero. "Literariness" and "scientificity" vacillate together. Serres disturbs. It is better not to listen.
In Zola, the point of contact between science, literature, and myth should not escape notice because it is everywhere. It is the essence of the oeuvre, and Serres brings this out well. However, the authors of theses on "Zola and science" have never seen it. They think according to epistemological breaks, or rather they let themselves be thought by them. They have been taught that the literary person and the scientist can meet only in a conscious reprise and repetition of certain results already perceived as "scientific." The scientific and the novelistic are opposed to and repel one another-while in Serres, they are one; beauty would serve as proof if only those who make a profession of the latter could see the former. To say of the novel that it functions here as a machine is to tell the strict truth in terms of aesthetic effect as well as scientific rigor. To make this unity other than an abstract truth we must rediscover, with Serres, the grand principles of thermodynamics. If Zola's novel invokes the locomotive, it is not for superficial reasons that belong above all to modernist demagoguery. Before any allusion to the railroad, Zola's text already operates like a steam engine:
The practice of the stoker, of the locomotive engineer, puts them in close contact with Carnot's great principle. We know that a steam engine could not function if it did not have at its disposal, simultaneously, a hot source, here the firebox-boiler complex, and a cold source, here the condenser or the outside atmosphere. Their difference, experienced as an opposition, modeled as a fall, from a reservoir in general to its consumption, produces work and thus movement. Zola's beasts are plunged into this difference, men, women, locomotives, objects, world. And it is this difference that produces the narrative, that develops it. Globally speaking, everything functions like the steam engine: the novel, its loves, and its crimes. (Z, 131)
If we observe the thermodynamic function in part of Zola's oeuvre and in many other writers, philosophers, and so forth, we find a relation to myth and above all, I think, to rite. Far from opposing rite to myth, as is done today, we must bring them together as was always done before. We must recognize in the rite the operation of mythological speech, but without seeking to make the latter the original of the former, or vice versa. The original is elsewhere.
In rites, as in Zola, the work of difference presents itself as an opposition, and even as a conflict between participants. But the conflict itself tends to suppress differences and to efface them in the symmetry and the reciprocity of all confrontation. In the initial stages of rites, to summarize, as in the thermodynamic machine, differences wear out and exhaust themselves. This exhaustion should tend toward complete immobility, the pure and simple absence of energy, the irreducible inertia of the second law. And this is indeed what happens, I repeat, in part of Zola's oeuvre. In another part, on the contrary, difference undoes itself and dies in work and conflict, only to be reborn and to remake itself at once more lively and more different than ever. Everything works as though indifferentiation, far from bringing itself back to a simple energetic zero, constituted a sort of spring, more and more tense and capable, on its own, of setting off the differentiating process all over again.
There is in this a principle of revival, inexhaustible because it is linked to the very exhaustion of the system. If we imagine it in the direct prolongation of the religious, this principle of revival is suddenly suspect. It is one-this is evident-with the religious fecundity of death itself for resurrection. It looks too much like everything that not only precedes supernatural ascensions and assumptions but determines them and sets them off under the name of "descent into the underworld" or "initiation ordeal."
In a thermodynamic context, this perpetual motion is conceivable only in a system that recharges itself automatically from the very fact that it exhausts itself-one thinks of a sort of thermostat-by an inexhaustible source of energy: the sun, naturally, which nearly always shines a discreet ray on resurrections. This thermodynamics of the eternal return is a final solar culture and must extinguish itself along with our confidence in the eternity of the stars, a little like those burning asters that accompany the Hugolian Satan in his fall. But in Hugo, as in Zola, suns may die without interrupting, elsewhere (or even here), the cycle of resurrections:
The sun was there, dying in the chasm. Coal of an extinguished world, torch blown out by God!
The God who blows out suns can relight other ones. This is still the old fecundity of death for life, and of disorder for putting back in order. Our ex-metaphysicians employ an incredible zeal in chasing away, everywhere, the traces of this guilty metaphysics. For centuries, it has been thought to be simply the product of a childish belief, a primitive tendency, well rooted in man, to take his desires for realities. Panicked fear of death would be sufficient to forge the myths capable of exorcising it. Serres does not always directly oppose this old formula, but all his works, it seems to me, call it into question.
In a perspective that gives priority to order and difference-that of thermodynamics without solar eternity-Zolaesque resurrections appear as an unjustifiable religious relic. Everything changes in the perspective of the other great scientific model, that which gives priority to disorder. On Michel Serres, I think, and perhaps also on Zola, this model exerts an attraction even stronger than does the first. It has its own fecundity, and it does not cease to reappear, alternating with the other model, especially in our time, against the positivism that is perpetuated among us thanks to the linguistic and differential taboo of a certain structuralism: "How could order come from disorder?" Lévi-Strauss asks rhetorically at the end of L'Homme nu. It is understood that the answer can only be negative. Ridiculous, indeed, in the context of an order that always has priority, which is that of a science outdated today; the question becomes legitimate again in a more current context, that of La Distribution, or of Prigogine's research:
Order is a rare island; it is an archipelago. Disorder is the common ocean from which these islands emerge. The undertow erodes the banks; the soil, worn, little by little loses its order and collapses. Elsewhere, a new archipelago will emerge from the waters. Disorder is the end of systems, and their beginning. Everything always goes toward chaos, and, sometimes, everything comes from it. (LD)
Even if everything only recommences "elsewhere," the endless alternation of disorder and order is no stranger to the mythico-ritual play of the "undifferentiated" always prior and posterior to each differentiation. The endless wheel of deaths and resurrections is simply a particular translation of this play, and it too can demand the "elsewhere" through metempsychosis.
The proximity of all these types of play had to lead Michel Serres to De rerum natura. More than any other, Lucretius's text is born of the "spaces of communication" between several cultural varieties. We exhaust ourselves in vain in distinguishing what might prefigure science, in this text, from what still belongs to myth. Gaining access to the scientific model means gaining access to the structure of myth, and vice versa.
Everything begins, ends, and begins again in the atoms that drop in an ever-freer fall, vertical and parallel, undoing what exists and preventing any new junction of atoms. Circulation becomes "laminar," and this must be so in order for the clinamen, somewhere, to come forth-the first departure from equilibrium, and the first difference that permits atoms to agglutinate. A new world constitutes itself, destined to end as the previous one did, and so on. The obvious absurdity of the clinamen comes from the fact that it has always been imagined in the framework of a solid mechanics. In the framework of a fluid mechanics, Serres shows, "the declination is the germ of a vortex in a hydraulic flow" (N).
What is important here is not only disorder's anteriority to order, but also its genetic function. There is no new clinamen without the prior destruction of all that the previous clinamen has sustained as to both world and existence. This genetic function of disorder dominates the ritual, and we are mistaken about the nature of the latter from overlooking the former. In so-called seasonal rites, for example, the disquieting modifications of natural order set the religious process in motion. When the weather "goes bad" (se gate) or "is rotten" (pourn), as we have been saying for the past few years, one might believe that nature itself is decomposing. Far from working against the forces of corruption, the rites hold out their hand to them, one might say, and collaborate in the subversive work. This strange paradox must be accepted: the community actively participates in the disorder that it dreads. We bustle about in all directions, we break laws, we mix what, according to the rules, should be differentiated. Observing this vain commotion, the ethnology of pure difference concludes from it, quite falsely, that the rite "takes pleasure in the undifferentiated" (N, 124). Rites never have any other goal than difference and order, but they always take place as though the (re)generative principle of order were found in disorder itself. To assure the best possible, the most vigorous, order, disorder must first be overactivated. A paroxysm of disorder must take place.
Rites of initiation work by the same principle as seasonal rites. The initiation ordeal is a loss of difference, a veritable immersion in conflictual disorder, and it must be as prolonged, as painfully as possible, to ensure an adequate metamorphosis, one that corresponds to the status sought by the postulant.
Our examples, up to this point, are not of a nature to modify the universal conception of the religious as superstition. This conception has not changed since the eighteenth century. Saying "phantasmatic superstructure" is but a more complicated way of repeating "superstition." Neither rites of initiation nor, above all, seasonal rites really cut into the real. To achieve its cycle, nature has no need of these men who absurdly gesticulate. Serres affirms, let me repeat, that myth-rite-remains dense in knowledge, and vice versa. It is the first part of this proposition that is always illustrated in the superior regions of science, those we visit with Michel Serres, as tourists often frightened, always marveling. The inferior regions do not have the same prestige, but it is to them that we must look, in order to illustrate the second part of the proposition, the and vice versa. Where does the reciprocal complicity between knowledge and the mythico-ritual begin? Serres's oeuvre suggests, it seems to me, that it is already there at the most rustic and most archaic level. For Serres to be completely correct, knowledge would have to be consubstantial with ritual. But we will not show this, I repeat, with the examples of rites that come to mind, even if we read them with the extreme goodwill of a Malinowski or, more recently, of a Victor Turner.
This is the case because the behaviors officially recognized and labeled as religious are preselected by virtue of their very absurdity. Always prior to all analysis, the definition of the religious as superstition or superstructure requires, unbeknownst to us, the partitioning of cultural data. We only recognize as essentially ritual, in other words, the conducts that have not led (and can never lead) to a technique we perceive as useful, to a knowledge that would truly be knowledge. In archaic societies, for example, the grape harvests and the making of wine almost always have a ritual character, but we immediately separate the technical aspect of the affair from its religious aspect. The latter thus always seems as useless, adventitious, and superfluous to us as in the example of the seasonal rites. Precisely because they are useful, technical gestures seem to us necessarily motivated by this utility-foreign, by the same token, to the religious; yet, on the contrary, only the religious can furnish the motivation and the type of behavior capable of leading to the discovery of these techniques.
In the invention of foodstuffs such as wine, bread, or cheese, chance must have played a part. Chance sometimes does things well, but spirits prepared to take advantage of it are still needed. Contrary to appearances, the ritual framework is the only one that makes this thinkable. The categories of the pure and the impure have always dominated the religious mentality. The spontaneous alterations of animal and vegetable secretions, like milk or fruit juice, must have struck humans as an impure phenomenon. They must have seen there something analogous to all that falls under rigorous interdiction: rotting corpses, gangrenous wounds, excrement, and so on. They must have reacted, at first, with mistrust and avoidance.
Behaviors of avoidance, relative to the impure, can degenerate into veritable religious phobias, and this is the case of the Nietzsche of the Antichrist, as of a certain Christianity. Serres quite justly opposes to these opposed but analogous puritanisms the scientific truth of caseation, foreign to the sinister image it has been given. One must see, however, that the religious is equally distanced, in its principle, from the puritanism stigmatized by Serres and from the delirium of innovation that also characterizes us, and that doubtless constitutes the other side, symmetrical and inverse, of our religious decomposition.
The religious spirit never goes without terrified repugnance toward the impure, but, in its balanced forms, it gives man the audacity to overcome this initial reaction and to intervene in the process of corruption-not at all in order to work against it, but in order to accelerate it. Noticing, or believing it notices, a loss of differences, the beginning of baneful confusion between things that should remain distinct, the rite overexcites the crisis and precipitates the mixtures in order to bring about a favorable resolution.
(Continues...)
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